If I Were to Disappear
by NCISgirl1527
Summary: As Serena considers the events of Bodies, she begins to wonder what would have happened if she had been one of Brunner's victims. Would anybody miss her? Jack is there to convince her that they would. Jack/Serena Friendship.


**_Okay so this is my third and final (at least for now) story that follows the episode Bodies. This one is partially Serena's point of view and partially her and Jack talking. I hope you like it._**

_**Disclaimer: I don't own Jack or Serena**_

_**Spoilers: Bodies**_

Serena shook her head as she looked over the files on her desk. She was trying to prepare for a trial she had coming up later in the week, but it was a pointless exercise. She was too distracted by the day's events to focus on anything else. Finally she closed the report in front of her, which she had reread three times in the past hour without taking in a single word, and leaned back in her desk chair running her hands though her hair.

Somehow the phrase 'long day' did not even begin to cover the day she had just had. Everything had started when Jessica had come forward asking to be removed as council. Well that in and of itself had not been a problem, but her removal from the case had cascaded into the mess they had found themselves in at the end of the day.

Still Serena in no way resented Jessica for wanting off the case. To be honest there had been a lot of times that day were Serena wished that she too could opt out of this case. Unfortunately that was not an option for several reasons. First she did not have any legal grounds for asking for removal. Second if she walked away from this one, she would lose the respect of almost every man in the DA's office. That was not something she could deal with. Thirdly, walking away meant leaving Jack alone to work with the scumbag, and that was not fair to him because Serena was pretty sure that Jack did not like Brunner any better than she did.

So she had stayed, and she and Jack had met Timothy Schwimmer. He was a strange kind of person, and in the beginning she had not liked him at all. Especially after he told her that his motion to get the id barred from the trial was just him practicing. Then he had followed her outside of work when she got her coffee and paper. As a sort of basic principle, she did not like men from work who followed her outside of it. Suspects, witnesses, defense lawyers, it did not matter to her. If they wanted to talk to her they could do so in the DA's office or some other appropriate setting, not outside work. The fact that she was pretty sure he had been flirting with her did not improve her impression of him either.

Then Brunner had revealed that he had told Schwimmer where the bodies were hidden. Up to that point she and Jack had been united in their dislike of both Brunner and Schwimmer, but then Jack went after Schwimmer for not telling where the bodies were. Serena shook her head. She wanted to know where those girls' bodies were hidden just as much as Jack did, but unlike Jack, she did not resent Schwimmer for refusing to share the information. In a way she almost respected him for it.

No, that was wrong. She did not respect him for not telling where the bodies where. She respected him because even though he wanted to tell them where those girls were, he refused to break confidentiality to do it. He adhered to the law in a way that Serena had believed not to exist among lawyers. So as a lawyer she respected him. As a person…she still thought he was a jerk.

Then there was Brunner…a man for whom the word jerk did not even begin to cover it. To be honest Serena thought that the term sick twisted scumbag was much more accurate.

_Oh, how I wish you would have hailed my cab. Sure, you hide behind that mask of virtue._

Serena shivered slightly at the memory of Brunner. She was not going to lie to herself. He had gotten under skin. Normally she was very good at keeping even the worst of the people they prosecuted from getting to her, but there was something about this guy that had gotten her. She knew exactly what it was too. It was his thinly veiled comments about a desire to make her his victim.

'I could have been one of them,' Serena thought to herself, 'Just by flagging the cab I could have become one of the nameless victims that he keeps in his secret place.'

It was a scary thought, but somehow it was not the one that really terrified her. What had really scared her was the large array of friends and family outside because it made her wonder about her own life. She had did not have a spouse or even a significant other. What family she had lived on the West Coast and probably would not notice if she disappeared. Her only friends were her colleagues in the DA's office.

So what really scared her was not the possibility of death. She saw that every day and knew that one day it would be her turn. No what really scared her was the possibility that when that day came…nobody would miss her. It might sound like a stupid fear, but at that moment it seemed more terrifying than being murder even at the hands of someone as brutal as Brunner. Suddenly there was a knock on her door interrupting her thoughts.

"Who is it?" she called looking up.

"It's Jack," Jack's voice replied from the other side of the door, "Can I come in?"

"Sure," Serena agreed looking back down at the desk in front of her as Jack let himself in a closed the door, "What do you want?"

"I just wanted to see if you wanted to talk," he told her calculating each of his words as he said them. It was not hard to see that today's case had taken its toll on Serena. The fact that she was sitting in her office in the dark testified to that. "Do you mind if I turn on a light?"

"What?" Serena asked confused looking around. She suddenly realized that the sunlight, which had been illuminating her office when she came in earlier that afternoon, had long since vanished leaving the room in almost complete darkness. "Oh sure," she agreed turning the desk lamp next to her on. There was a pause in which Jack tried to figure out what to say, and Serena waited for him to do so. However after a few moments she voiced her own thoughts. "I don't think he's going to talk Jack," she told him.

"I'm starting to think you're right," he admitted, "I thought watching all the parents testify would crack him, but I guess not."

"He believes in the system," Serena said with a shake of her head, "he won't talk."

There was a pause where they both fell back into science. Jack was watching Serena fiddle with a pen that was lying on her desk. He knew she was shaken, but was not sure what he should say. Still he knew that he should say something. He had always felt protective of his ADA's, and wanted Serena to know that she could talk to him if she needed to.

"Do you want to talk about what happened today?" he asked her finally. It gave her a way out if she did not want to, but it also gave her an opportunity if she did.

"Yes and no," she told him with a sigh.

"Whatever you feel comfortable with," Jack offered her, and in some part of his brain he realized how similar this conversation was to one he had had with Abbie a few years previous.

"What Brunner said about me," she told him a little tiredly, "What if I had been his victim? Would anybody miss me? I mean look at me. I'm in my late thirties, no marriage, no kids. My only surviving family member lives on the west coast, and we haven't spoken in nearly two years."

Jack swallowed. He had been trying very hard to avoid thinking of what Brunner might have done to Serena if he had gotten the opportunity, but that was not the important part right now. The important part was convincing Serena that she would be missed if she left, and Jack was not quite sure how to do that.

"Serena, I can't speak for anybody else" he told her finally, "but if you were to disappear, and I would do everything in my power to make sure the bastard responsible for it spent the rest of his miserable life rotting in a jail cell." It was not something that he would normally tell her, but somehow he thought she needed to hear it.

"Thanks Jack," she told with a small smile.

"Anytime," he told her standing up, "Do me a favor. Go home and get some sleep."

"Alright," she told with a nod of her head. Somehow Jack's pure, simple, revenge driven statement had made her feel much better.

"One more thing," he said turning back towards her as he opened her office door. She looked up at him. "Don't take a cab."

Serena almost laughed at that. "I wasn't planning on it," she assured him.

_**Did you like it? I would love to know what you think of it. Please review.**_


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